Van Gogh transformed in Paris

Standing atop Montmartre, I gazed across Paris to the Eiffel Tower and tried to picture Vincent Van Gogh being happy living and working in the City of Love, the City of Light. Perhaps because we’d explored the Netherlands countryside where the peasant-inspired artist grew up, I just couldn’t imagine him in a big city.

However, as we learned by investigating Montmartre one rainy day, the hilltop community of Vincent’s time was quite different from today.

In the late 1880s, Montmartre was an enclave of independent-spirited rebels, bohemian artists and writers, working-class folk, and those who appreciated cheap rents and wine, cafés and cabarets. It had been annexed by Paris in 1860 and was transforming but remained more country than city. Vincent’s rambles amongst the windmills and fields and vineyards and big vegetable gardens, past construction workers and farmers, would have kept the highly sensitive soul grounded. For a time at least.

Just as Montmartre was transforming, so was Vincent.

Vincent’s Montmartre homes

Vincent had 38 addresses in his brief 37 years, according to a series of information panels we found near the Montmartre Museum that described his years in France. He couldn’t stay put for long. Two of those addresses were in Montmartre (in the 18^th arrondissement).

When he arrived in early 1886, Vincent moved in with his brother Theo on Rue Victor Masse. (Theo – who supported Vincent emotionally, artistically, and financially – worked as a Paris art dealer.) But the third-floor apartment proved too small for two, so they shortly moved to Rue Lepic. We found both places, unmarked by any plaques to explain the troubled talent who had lived behind those stone walls.

Vincent painted several scenes of the view from his window over Paris. In 1886, his palette was still muted – more like his Dutch paintings (think “The Potato Eaters”). But the 1887 view used brighter colours and a style that showed the increasing influence of the impressionist painters with whom he was spending time.

His Paris paintings

Indeed, his Paris years proved to be transformative, although he resisted at first.

“It took Vincent a year after coming to Paris before he began to experiment with the ideas of the Impressionists,” according to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. “He painted new subjects, such as city scenes, and practiced the Impressionists’ loose brushstrokes and light colour palette. His artistic work evolved at a dizzying pace.”

He visited art galleries, studied nude painting, hung out with fellow artists in cafés, and painted with them, building a “whole network of friends and acquaintances with whom he could discuss paintings and experiments,” said the information panels. It proved to be a preparatory, experimental, learning phase before his later successes in Arles and Auvers-sur-Oise.

He is not, however, considered an impressionist painter but rather a post-impressionist; although he learned and applied some impressionist techniques, he developed them further, both in style and subject matter. For example, instead of short brushstrokes, he developed the swirls of his Starry Night paintings.  

Other artists in Montmartre

The Montmartre Museum is housed in the former home of Renoir. When we visited, we saw the special exhibit on Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen, who drew the famous Chat Noir posters and loved to paint cats.

Montmartre was a magnet for artists, who appreciated the cheap rents and convivial company in cafés, bistros, dance halls, and cabarets. Vincent met artists of all sorts, but became friends with Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, Paul Signac and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

We paused outside Lautrec’s apartment, around a couple of corners from Vincent’s second apartment and not far uphill from the Moulin Rouge where Lautrec famously sketched and painted the can-can dancers. (We saw the Disneyfied Moulin Rouge, which did not open until 1889, after Vincent left Paris.)

Exploring Montmartre inevitably leads you to learn about other artists’ sojourns there. The Salvador Dali Museum exhibits about 300 of his surrealist paintings, sculptures and sketches. (The famous Spaniard also hung out in the Montparnasse neighbourhood, as we found by searching out filming sites for the movie “Midnight in Paris.”) Pablo Picasso lived and painted with other artists in a rambling building called Le Bateau Lavoir, where he developed cubism and shared ideas with Amedeo Modigliani and Georges Braque. Auguste Renoir lived and painted in the house now occupied by the Montmartre Museum.

While the museum does not focus at all on Vincent, it does a great job of setting the transforming Montmartre scene of his time, describing the increasing urbanization and influx of artists after 1870, bringing with them their creative energies and bohemian spirits.

We learned about artists I’d never heard of before.

• Suzanne Valadon: one of the first artists to paint a male nude and the first woman to exhibit at the Société national des beaux-arts (1894). Before becoming a painter, she was a model for Toulouse-Lautrec, slept with Renoir and studied with Edgar Degas.
• Maurice Utrillo: the son of Valadon, Utrillo got into lots of trouble as a youth, but eventually settled down and painted scenes of Montmartre, including Sacre Coeur.
• Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen: the left-wing creator of the famous Chat Noir posters painted people on the margins of society as well as many cats, who were seen as a symbol of bohemia. Steinlen used them as the “feline personification of human traits.” The mountain of cats in “L’Apothéose des chats à Montmartre,” for example, illustrates what could happen if capitalism did not obstruct bohemian life. He lived in Montmartre from 1881 until his death in 1923.

Vincent would surely have met Steinlen and Valadon, although Utrillo would have been a child when Vincent roamed Montmartre.

Place du Tertre, a stone’s throw from Sacre Coeur Basilica, is a central square where passersby can see artists at work. They set up their easels every day and paint or sketch their slices of life. They did so in Vincent’s time and still do so now. We visited on a soggy day, so the few artists who braved the downpour had their artwork protected by umbrellas and tarps (see top photo).  

Cafes and cabarets

Vincent’s “Terrace of a Café on Montmartre La Guinguette” is now called La Bonne Franquette. Steinlen created many versions of the black cat posters to advertise the Chat Noir Cabaret. Au Lapin Agile still offers cabaret nights.  

As my grandfather would have said, you can’t swing a cat in Montmartre without hitting a café or cabaret – now and in Vincent’s time. When he wasn’t rambling the roads and pathways to find places to paint, Vincent hung out with other artists, drinking absinthe and exchanging ideas, painting techniques and tips about how the art world worked.

He also painted many cafés, including Le Tambourin (which no longer exists) and La Ginguette, now called La Bonne Franquette. We ambled slowly by, trying to see any similarities between the painting of Ginguette and the real-life Franquette. I concluded that his view must have been from inside the café.

I had always thought cabarets were places to see dancing girls. But we learned at the Montmartre Museum about other forms of entertainment, such as recitations, variety shows and shadow theatres. In 1886, the year Vincent moved to Montmartre, shadow theatres were brand new. They used moveable zinc plates cut in the shapes of figures and trees and animals, plus coloured lights, music and voices to tell stories – a precursor to movie theatres. He surely would have enjoyed this modern, sophisticated form of theatre.

No doubt Vincent would have been drawn to the Chat Noir cabarets; Rodolphe Salis owned and ran them in the 1880s and 1890s.

“Le Chat Noir was most of all a meeting place for arts,” said a museum panel. “Salis encouraged literary, artistic and musical collaboration in his cabaret. Le Chat Noir published a magazine [with illustrations by Steinlen], organized the sale of paintings and brought artists… together with famous poets and musicians.”

Gardens and windmills

Le Moulin de la Galette, today and as Vincent painted it, is not far from the Clos Montmartre Vineyard and gardens that inspired him. We hadn’t known Paris still has a vineyard!

Vincent painted many pastoral scenes of the vegetable gardens, flowers, trees, and windmills that lent their rural feel to the increasingly urbanized Montmartre.

Vineyards had been a feature since Roman times and flourished after the 1100s when monks and nuns produced wine for the local abbey. In Vincent’s time, they were disappearing and today just one active vineyard within Paris city limits remains. The Clos Montmartre Vineyard offers a glimpse of the rural flavour that would have helped Vincent breathe deeply and relax. We peered through the iron fence at its tidy rows spilling down the hill behind the Montmartre Museum. The vineyard is closed to tourists, except during the grape harvest in October. 

The dozens of windmills that dotted Montmartre must have made Vincent feel at home. He had often painted windmills in his native Netherlands, and continued to paint them here. They were used to press grain and grapes and crush gypsum rocks mined under Montmartre.

Today, just two of those original windmills remain and we found them both: Moulin Radet and Moulin de la Galette, which had been a popular outdoor dance hall in Vincent’s time. Today, it’s a restaurant. It did seem strange to find the four-bladed windmills in the centre of Paris, remnants of the past.

Sacre Coeur transformed Montmartre

Vincent painted Montmartre’s hilltop several times, showing the old quarries. He surely would have seen Sacre Coeur under construction, although he didn’t stay in Montmartre long enough to see the magnificent mosaics that adorn the walls and domes inside.

Like Vincent, Montmartre and Paris were also transforming. The Eiffel Tower was under construction, due to open for the World’s Fair in 1889, the same year the Moulin Rouge welcomed its first visitors. And, at the crown of Montmartre’s hill, construction on Sacre Coeur Basilica had begun in 1875 and would continue until 1914 (although it was not consecrated until 1919, after the First World War).

Vincent would surely have seen the construction, although there’s no sign of it in his paintings of Montmartre’s hilltop. Still, he did include quarries along the bottom of those paintings.

I had not realized the significance of those quarries until we visited Montmartre. The Romans had begun mining gypsum there and it continued through the centuries until about 1860. Because it resisted fire and water, gypsum was used to make plaster – plaster of Paris! (Duh! I’d never put that together.) The mines riddled the ground, so before the basilica could be built, they had to shore up the hill with rock and concrete pillars that descended 40 metres below ground to support the church.      

Dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Byzantine-looking white basilica with its five onion domes is as stunning inside as out. The mosaics in particular commanded our awe – they seemed to glow in the soft, warm lighting.

We’re always thrilled to find any mention of Canada during our European travels, and we found two in Sacre Coeur:

• In 1959, Canadians donated a statue of Our Lady of the Cape to honour the 300^th anniversary of the arrival of Saint Francis de Montmorency-Laval, a French missionary and the first bishop of Quebec.
• On the left of a mosaic image of nuns was Saint Marie of the Incarnation (1599-1672), who was an Ursuline missionary in Canada.  

Boulevard de Clichy

Vincent regularly walked along the Boulevard de Clichy, just a short stroll from his apartment, to get to Café du Tambourin (not there any more) and Père Tanguy’s art supply shop. We walked along the wide street as well, noting all the porn shops and dildo emporiums that line it today.

What would Vincent think?

Well, he likely would not have been surprised at the sex fantasies on offer, given that the boulevard had attracted the bistros, cheap wine, ladies of questionable virtue, and prostitutes of his day, as well as all the artists. Shortly after Vincent left Paris, the Moulin Rouge opened at 82 Boulevard de Clichy, offering risqué views of working-class girls’ legs as they danced the can-can. The boulevard had been the boundary line between Paris and Montmartre before its annexation in 1860. Since Montmartre had had no taxes on booze, it had attracted all the disreputable ne’er-do-wells. The remnants remain today.

Père Tanguy’s art supply shop

Kindly Père Tanguy became a father-figure to the artists he supplied. Vincent’s painting of him can be seen in the Rodin museum.

Vincent saw his first Japanese prints, which influenced his later work, at Père Tanguy’s art supply shop. Julien-François Tanguy, nicknamed Père [father] Tanguy, didn’t just grind, mix and sell paints to artists like Vincent, Paul Cezanne, Gauguin, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec. The supportive father-figure also took paintings as payments and displayed them in his shop, giving cash-strapped artists recognition and exposure.

Vincent painted Père Tanguy three times and, with each painting, he used more and more colour and light, illustrating the transformation he experienced during his Paris years. The last portrait, which shows Père Tanguy surrounded by Japanese prints, ended up in the Musée Rodin – the sculptor had admired Van Gogh’s work.

More Vincent

Exploring Montmartre gave us a feel for where Vincent lived – the hills he climbed to meet artist friends in cafés, the windmills that reminded him of his Dutch upbringing, and expansive views over Paris that inspired him.

To see some of the paintings he created, the best place in Paris is the Musée d’Orsay. (We had been there before but didn’t have time to return this trip.)

Its collection of two dozen Van Gogh paintings includes two from his time in Montmartre: “Imperial Fritillaries in a Copper Vase” and one of the many self-portraits he painted. Until Feb. 3, 2024, the Musée d’Orsay has a special exhibit about the last two months of Vincent’s life, in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris. 

Moving on

Given Vincent’s fragile mental health and his innate longing for the countryside, it’s not surprising that he moved on from Paris after just two years.

“Life in the big city took a heavy toll on Vincent’s health. He smoked and drank too much and ate poorly,” said the Van Gogh Museum’s website.

“He realized that he was subjecting both body and soul to too much strain and decided to extricate himself from the capital while he still could,” said the information panels on the street.

In early 1888, Vincent went to Arles, seeking peace, quiet and sunshine in the southern France countryside.

He must have sensed that the transformative time he’d spent in Paris would continue, as he noted in an 1888 letter to Theo: “It still seems to me that I am a traveller who is going somewhere and to a destination.”

We visited Paris in November 2023. Find out where we are right now by visiting our ‘Where’s Kathryn?’ page.